If the current frenzy to purge our pockmarked past keeps up — the names, statues, the triggers! — there will be little that remains.

You might have missed the news, but last year Cornell University renamed its Cornell Plantations, a lovely garden spot set amid campus, to “Cornell Botanic Gardens.”

Why?

Because a group of outraged kiddies calling themselves Black Students United demanded it. They didn’t like the word “Plantations.”

Well, so what, you might think. Cornell has a rich history of asking, “How high?!” when agitated students order “Jump!” Recall that in 1969 well armed black students occupied Cornell’s administration building, threatening violence unless their demands were met.

The punishment these students received for these illegal acts was to have all their demands met. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind cited the cowardice of the university’s leadership as his reason to flee Cornell.

The problem now, of course, is that there are few places left to flee to. And even if you can find sanctuary, you might discover the name of the place you’ve fled to has changed.

Occult White Supremacists

Yale buckled under the oh-so-slight pressure of students to rename Calhoun College. Calhoun was a Vice President of these once United States, but some progressive developed the idea that Calhoun was a “white supremacist,” or somehow had “ties” to “white supremacists,” and so his name had to be sent down the memory hole.

Everybody knows about the statuary being removed everywhere. Anything that reminds the easily triggered that history was not the utopia they demand it to be has to go, they say, lest some poor soul glance upon the sad face of Robert E. Lee and decide to re-implement slavery. It could happen.

He who controls the past, controls you, to modify a phrase.

Virtuous Signalling

“Leaders” of various stripes are eager to signal their virtue and are everywhere announcing proposed iconoclasms. This buys them small notice, which they hope they can parlay into something bigger, perhaps a position of more power. Whoever heard, or wanted to hear, from Seattle mayor Ed Murray, until he demanded a monument to Confederate soldiers in a cemetery be removed?

It isn’t only here that history is being purged. All Western countries are eager to be noticed, to show their love of the glowing future which is sure to arrive when people’s memories have been properly adjusted. In Syndney, Australia, there are demands to remove the 138-year-old statue of Captain Cook. The problem? Its nameplate has the audacity to announce that Cook “discovered” that land. Which he did, to the notice of the West. But never mind.

Activists, that breed of ne’er-do-well that democracies produce in abundance, are “outraged” there still exist markers of the existence of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford college. It has been observed that none of these progressives are eager to give back the money Rhodes donated.

Many more examples can be brought to mind. But these are of what has already happened. The real trick is to guess where the rabble will strike next. Cornell, I suggest, provides the clue.

Back to the Plantation

Students, who are by definition uneducated, didn’t like “plantations” because some slaves, not all of them black, at some time in the past were made to work on them. Slaves were also made to work on farms, which means the classic song Old MacDonald is in grave danger. Look for the Slate article, “E-I-E-I-O is the Secret Call of White Supremacists.” A certain cookie company will have to look for a new name. Perhaps Pepperidge Growing Land?

Plantation, Florida, a town of some 90,000 souls, will have to go. I suggest it be rechristened Progress, Florida.

Hidden Dogma

Rechristened is itself a difficult word. Why? We have seen this week that Senator and secular Jew Diane Feinstein questioned the faith of Catholic judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett, saying “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.”

That dogma also lives loudly in many of our landmarks. Take San Francisco. If you’re a student from Cornell, I must explain that “San” means saint, as in Catholic saint. Our modern-day Sodom — or perhaps Gomorrah? — is actually named Saint Francis. How about instead Milked? Named for homosexual activist Harvey Milk, of course.

And what is the capitol of California, the home state of Mizz Feinstein? Sacramento, a.k.a. the Blessed Sacrament. Talk about dogma! I suggest The Current Year as replacement, as in “How can you still believe that? Don’t you know it’s the current year?”

Then there is Los Angeles itself. Guadalupe, named after Our Lady of Guadalupe, San Diego, San Bernardino, Santa Maria (Cornell students: santa is also saint), Rancho Santa Margarita, St. Helena, San Fernando, San Jose, San Mateo, and many, many more. And that’s only in California!

Our work has just begun.